Determining relationships between individuals can be useful for a variety of reasons. For example, individuals may wish to construct family trees for religious, cultural, recreational or other reasons. In another example, an individual wishing to contact another person may try to identify people that could establish such a “link.”
A person may use, for example, documents to identify relationships between people. Many documents (e.g., public genealogical documents) are now accessible using a computer and the Internet. Thus, a person may search for specific documents or documents relating to a specific person. Information from the document may be used to identify a network of related people or research, such as a family tree.
Many users may access the same record and may use the information to modify their family tree or other family history research and/or constructed networks. Though some users may be interested in how others are using the information from the same record, current systems known to the applicant do not make it possible to discover this and do not dynamically inform users of modifications to the record or modifications to other users' research based on information from the record. First, it may be difficult to identify whether an element of a first user's network is related to a specific document or identifier, especially in a system including a large number of documents, each including various combinations of information. Second, even if such relations are identified, maintaining and updating a scheme to recognize all potentially interesting modifications to representations related to a person identified in a document is difficult, particularly in light of the fact that users may be able to add and remove network elements in such representations. Third, particular modifications may be uninteresting to a user; for example, the user may have already been alerted of a similar modification or may not be interested in information associated with the modification. Sending too much information about modifications to a user may, in fact, be counterproductive, overburdening the system or making it difficult for the user to recognize the potentially interesting information. Fourth, even tracking all such modifications on a system may be difficult. Fifth, users making such modifications may not wish to have the modifications publicized and may wish that their account information and modifications be kept private.